Monthly Archives: March 2011

We’ve been piloting the use of various technologies for several months now, such as the Flip cameras, Voxur units and MP3 voice recorders in many projects here at Birmingham City University. These have mainly been curriculum design based projects but we have had interest from a number of diverse areas from within the institution and always keen not to miss an opportunity we have also been collaborating with these slightly off scope projects.

Collectively, these projects are helping us to establish usage patterns, usage and user preferences (voice Vs video), how projects influence course structure, how students experience feedback, the delivery of course / placement outcomes, how students with disabilities perceive their induction programmes and first year at university and a range of other interesting any worthwhile projects.

To give you an idea of uptake, we purchased 70 Flip cameras, 60 of which are currently being used by 13 unique projects. 2 of our 3 Voxur units are currently being used with the 3rd being used for 8 weeks from mid-March by our Library & Learning Resources Team. In the past 6 months the 3 Voxur units have been used to collect data for 11 different projects and have generated around 90 hours of footage collectively.

Interestingly, we purchased 30 MP3 voice recorders which we thought would be useful to certain projects where participants were uncomfortable with being videoed. However we have only loaned out 12 of these at the moment, and despite some reports of initial reticence from individuals to being videoed, it seems that many project organisers are still keen to push this means of data collection.

We’ve had a lot of interest in using the technologies from participants of our Student Academic Partners Scheme which is generating an increasing amount of feedback data (both written and video) that we are beginning to collate for the purpose of sharing with future users in the form of a ‘how to guide’.

If you’d like more information on these projects please post in the comments section below, alternatively you can visit our Student Academic Partners Scheme website and blog here.